May 19 2007
ICT in MfL
I was delighted to join Janet with a small group of top set Year 8s yesterday to see how she is using ICT as part of her PGCE project. To begin with, the five students came up with some of the phrases, in Spanish, that they would want to use in a tour of the school. I was very impressed with their vocabulary, ideas, grammar and accents. They then had about ten minutes to write out a short script that they could refer to if stuck. Pupils asked great questions, such as “How do you say, ‘My favourite subject is …’?” After about 20 minutes in the room planning their short tour, they left in two groups, each armed with a Canon PowerShot camera (or whatever it’s called!) and went off to record. I accompanied the girls, who went to the front gate and welcomed visitors to the school. We recorded along the top corridor, and interviewed one of the assistant heads (a very ad hoc interview, but fun nonetheless!). Janet will make these videos and photos into a short film of the school, including Spanish subtitles, which will be able to be used in school to teach school vocabulary. It also has the potential of being used in the case of a link with a Spanish-speaking school.
I was very impressed with this practical and helpful use of ICT. It was not an add-on or an extra – it promoted the use of the target language, it inspired creativity, it made the language learning extremely practical because the audience was clear, and it was a fun way of extending G&T pupils that will support others. It was also clear that the pupils were highly engaged. I hope to see the final product, which I am sure will be very professional.
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The trials and tribulations of year 8! I am back blogging. Ur blogs are very engaging.
I have been learning a lot from Susan who is several steps ahead of me still on technology and who has been helping me with her inspirational use of ICT. I was lucky enough to be in her Y8 RE class on Friday afternoon. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen Y8s so engaged during period 6 on a sunny Friday! They had started to think, last lesson, about a message that God might want to convey to his people. Now the teacher wanted them to work on the medium – how would he get the message across? They spent the first 15 minutes or so jotting down ideas or simply talking about the best way to do this. Susan appeared to have allowed them to work in friendship groups, which worked extremely well. And the groups were of different sizes – a noisy, vocal large group who put little on paper but who were buzzing with ideas and who captured some video clips in order to make a film; a smaller group who wanted to put together a comic strip, and a pair of quieter, arty pupils – with whom I spent most of the time – who were painstakingly working on Photoshop to refine and colour a beautiful illustration of God’s messenger that they had electronically transmitted into the computer. Throughout their creation of these resources, however, the pupils were firmly focussed on WHAT they wanted to say – or God’s message – not just on HOW. I look forward to seeing the results of this fantastic lesson and will definitely be taking away some ideas for my own languages classroom. Thank you, Susan.
Janet (the beginning MFL teacher)
Thanks, Janet, for the thoughtful description of Friday’s lesson. It’s always good to see something from someone else’s point of view!